How To Successfully Teach For Deep Understanding: The Missing Step

Do you want to help your students to develop a deep understanding of the material you are teaching? It is a noble intention. Yet, many teachers fail to do so. This is not from a lack of trying. Rather, it is because they miss the essential first step.

Foundational Knowledge – The Missing Step In Deep Understanding

Many people see the teaching of knowledge as being the enemy of deeper conceptual understanding. This is not the case. As John Hattie points out, both are needed.

In fact, students cannot develop deep understandings without having a foundational bank of knowledge. Their knowledge base gives them something ‘to think about’. And, it provides the foundation upon which deeper understanding depends. The more facts a student knows, the more capacity they have to glean deeper understandings.

If we want pupils to have good conceptual understanding, they need more facts, not fewerDaisy Christodoulou

Consider this example shared by Dan Willingham:

A Year 4 class was starting to learn about rain forests. Thier teacher asked them to state whether they would like to live in a rain forest and to justify why. Students without sufficient background knowledge gave shallow responses such as:

No, because it would be wet

Yes, because it would be fun

In this case, the teacher asked students to apply a higher-order thinking skill (justifying) without providing them with a sufficient knowledge base. As a result, it did nothing to deepen their understanding. Sadly, we do this a lot in modern classrooms.

When asked the same question, students with a larger bank of interconnected knowledge gave answers such as:

No, because the poor soil and constant shade would mean she may have to include meat in her diet, and she was a vegetarian

This is an excellent example of how knowledge builds to allow sophisticated higher-order responses. You can only make that response if you know that:

Rainforests have poor soil and constant shade

This makes it difficult to grow agricultural crops there

When the knowledge base is not in place, pupils struggle to develop an understanding of a topic. Deep thinking (such as justification) is essential. Yet, without the prerequisite knowledge, it cannot be used to nurture deep learning.

Sadly, many teachers ask their students to demonstrate deep understanding using strategies such as:

Yet, they do so without teaching their students the foundational knowledge and skills needed to genuinely learn from such strategies.

This explains why research shows that such strategies often fail to have the desired effect on student learning. It is a matter of when they are used (i.e. after developing foundational knowledge), rather than whetherthey should be used.

Students Can’t Just Look It Up

Some teachers argue that knowledge is irrelevant. Why? Because students can just look things up as they need to.

It is true that the internet gives us unprecedented access to a wealth of information. It is also true that teaching research skills (especially source evaluation) is essential. However, scanning sites for isolated facts does not automatically lead to students developing a deep understanding of the topic at hand.

It is too easy to confuse information access with genuine knowledge acquisitionGregory Yates

Access to information does not ensure that students understand what they read – even for good readers.

A student’s capacity to make sense of what they are reading is highly dependent upon their background knowledge of the topic at hand.

Comprehension demands background knowledge.Daniel Willingham

When you don’t actively build up students’ knowledge of a topic, they cannot engage in any form of meaningful inquiry. They simply don’t know enough about the broader topic to make sense of what they read. And, they have no hope of discerning what is relevant, let alone turning it all into an answer to the assignment question.

If you want to help students develop essential research skills, teach them foundational facts, as well as the skills themselves. A broad, background knowledge provides the foundation for understanding the specific things that they will read on the internet.

In Closing

You should teach both surface knowledge and develop deeper levels of understanding. This challenges the either–or thinking that we often take when talking about how to teach. There are many examples where changing the word or to the word and makes much more sense. For more on this idea, see One Word That Can Improve Your Teaching.

About the Author

Shaun Killian is an experienced teacher and principal with a passion for helping students to excel. He believes that assisting teachers to adopt evidence-based education is the best way to make this happen. Shaun is committed to bringing you practical advice based on solid research.

You can connect with him on following channels:
• Follow on Twitter
• Like on Facebook

Comments

As a teacher of History for 32 years, I found this very interesting.Because I come from a New History paradigm I have had to defend the teaching of skills and concepts against the Old History school who want to muddy the argument by claiming New History Inquiry Approach teachers do not teach content and knowledge. Of course we do! To do otherwise would be to try to build a house without bricks. If Concepts provide the blueprint and skills the construction methods, mortar et c then content is the brick or straw or sticks or… In particular, I think we need to pre-load students with a deep understanding of the Discipline Vocabulary they’ll need to learn.

Thanks Shaun. This is the biggest gripe I have about our schools. Too many teachers making the mistake of skipping over content knowledge and trying to have students think deeply about things they haven’t learnt. I blame this on the Aust. curriculum, with its emphasis on skills. It’s largely about what you can do rather than what you should know.

Some teachers claim that they teach content but from my experience it is very fragmented, often just little bullet points and very often comes from students conducting their own research on the computer rather than being taught the knowledge. As you pointed out this is just gather information not providing knowledge.From what I have seen History has suffered the most in this regard.